‘Much to my horror I found the floorboards afloat… my boat was slowly sinking!’

Dick Durham takes his gaffer, Betty, for a shakedown sail... which quickly becomes a breakdown sail after a series of disasters leaves him shaken

Darkness still reigned when I warped Betty II, my 25ft gaff cutter, out of her mud-berth at Canvey Island, in the Thames Estuary. Once out in the deep water of Hadleigh Ray, I picked up a buoy to stow stores and await the dawn, as Betty’s restoration has not, so far, included navigation lights.

By the time night’s shadows had become a grey, flat dawn, I had lost an hour of fair ebb tide. But with a following southwesterly breeze puffing up to Force 4, necessitating a reef in her huge gaff mainsail, I expected to make short work of getting down the coast to the Spitway.

So, on a chilly May morning, Betty, under reefed mainsail, with staysail and jib set on her bowsprit end, sped away down Sea Reach.

Progress seemed satisfactory, and it wasn’t long before I heard an intermittent clanging, like the efforts of a novice bell ringer, from the Maplin Sands buoy and, putting the helm up brought the wind dead astern.

Soon I could make out the distant white blades of the Gunfleet wind farm, twirling like juggler’s bats, as I approached the cow-brown shallow water of the Whitaker sand, across the end of which I coaxed Betty.

I peered northward trying to pick up the Swin Spitway buoy, which marks the southern end of the fabled swatchway path, a loway through the shoals of the Buxey and Gunfleet Sands.

Betty was now heeling to the freshening breeze as I came abeam the wind. She could have done with another reef.

‘Typical,’ I said to the sky, ‘go on, freshen up just as I need to concentrate.’ Then I felt the boat graunching briefly, stop, then graunch again. Peering below, I could see the rope of the centre-plate haul had gone slack. I nipped below and heaved the plate up halfway.

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Much to my horror, I found the floorboards afloat… Betty was slowly sinking!

She had been out of the water much too long this spring, and the hair-dryer warm easterly winds and drought-like conditions had opened up her topsides. Now she was rocking and rolling in a choppy sea over the sands, and the newly painted, pitch-pine planking was taking its first drink in many months.

Frantically moving the bilge pump handle up and down with one hand while steering with the other, I could not get the pump to suck.

‘You bastard,’ I yelled, taking my frustration out on the sky again.

For now, I had to leave the bilges throwing water this way and that while I struggled to find the Swin Spitway buoy. I eventually identified its tall red and white pillar cage through the binoculars.

After Betty was past the swatchway’s twin – the tubby, round cage of the Wallet Spitway buoy – I stowed sail and fired up the engine.

I now left the helm and furiously waggled the arm up and down until the pump started to suck out the bilge water.

On the sandy end of Mersea Island, children bathed, unaware of the passing brown-sailed gaffer and her fretful skipper.

Then I noticed smoke coming from the engine box. Sea water drying off the flywheel from my earlier ingress, I reckoned. I lifted the lid to discover hot water spurting, hose-like, from the heat exchanger onto the engine casing.

The heat exchanger that, from the manual, had seemed complex enough to produce maintenance myopia – and which had me taking refuge in the delusion of ‘lorry diesels do thousands of miles without hassle’ – had now ruptured.

I was obliged to sail to the nearest boatyard, where Betty received the attention she should have had all along. My shakedown had become a breakdown.

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